Theatre review: BOOM is an explosion of sound, vision and song

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The eponymous BOOM of Rick Miller’s touring hit invokes the Hiroshima bomb, the post-war baby boom and the boom of the rocket boosters which took man to the moon. But it could also refer to the explosive energy of the man himself, whose previous work includes the Shakespeare-meets-the-Simpsons spoof MacHomer and occasional collaborations with Robert Lepage.

For almost two hours, Miller powers through 25 years and some hundred voices, many of them musical: included are clean cut crooners from the ’40s, rock’n’rollers from the ’50s, and the wild men and women of the pre-Woodstock era. All the while he perfectly calibrates his performance with a truly dazzling cascade of imagery, projected onto and beyond the see-through cylinder which surrounds him.

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As a showcase for Miller’s stamina and impersonation skills, BOOM, which clocked its 200th performance last Tuesday, is already on solid ground. But it’s also a fascinating, kaleidoscopic overview of an era, taking in everything from Cold War anxieties, the birth of television, the civil rights movement, the blooming and withering of flower power optimism, the naiveté (or extreme chutzpah) of ’50s and ’60s admen, and plenty more besides.

Much of it covers familiar territory, and of course there’s an undeniable nostalgic thrill to be had in that. Even if, like Miller, you didn’t actually live through that tumultuous period (he was born in 1970), the iconic stills and footage of, say, JFK, MLK, Che, Elvis et al are hardwired into even the most historically incurious consciousness. But Miller finds several ways to make this more than a run-through of history’s golden oldies.

For a start, he’s chosen three characters to guide us through the period:  his Viennese dad, his erstwhile hippie mom (heavily fictionalized, he admitted in one of the talkbacks he gives after every show), and an African-American draft dodger.

Miller also drops in plenty of lesser-known nuggets: who knew that Harry S. Truman was briefly a member of the KKK?

Most importantly, he makes lots of salient connections between past and the present – a Trudeau again in the highest office, for instance, and a resurgence of the spirit of ’68 in the Occupy Movement.

Miller is a thoroughly likeable stage presence, so it will inevitably come over as churlish to suggest he might be a bit too likeable. But I sometimes yearned for a little more grit, a touch more anger, pessimism, even disgust at some of the low points of the period. Clearly, though, that isn’t his thing, which is mainly to give his audience a thoroughly good time. On that score he certainly succeeds: for much of the show’s running time, I was mesmerized.

AT A GLANCE

BOOM is at the Segal Centre, 5170 Côte-Ste-Catherine Rd., to April 10. Tickets: $50 to $64; students: $32; under 30: $40; seniors: $45 to $57.50. Call 514-739-7944 or visit segalcentre.org

The icky and uncanny world of horror scribe H. P. Lovecraft is given an eclectic makeover in The Other Theatre’s latest show (actually an evolution of an earlier “theatre lab” experiment). Love U Lovecraft riffs on the short story The Colour Out of Space, a terrifying mood piece in which a life-sucking meteorite lays waste to a 19th-century farming community.

Director Stacey Christodoulou and her team take a collage approach, with dance, music, bilingual narration and naturalistic scenes creating an impressionistic mélange of past and present, as the calcified farmhouse and its spectral watcher exert a malign influence on two contemporary couples.

Some of the show still feels like it’s at the experimental phase, the dance elements particularly resisting integration. But it builds to an often weirdly affecting stage poem which, like this company’s previous show, Province (co-produced with Talisman), hints at ecological horrors to come.

AT A GLANCE

Love U Lovecraft is at Théâtre La Chapelle, 3700 St-Dominique St., to April 2. Tickets: $29; discount: $25. Call 514-843-7738 or visit lachapelle.org